Have Zombies Gone Soft? Not if You Know Where to Lurk

Imagine what it was like for the truest of vampire fanatics to read or see Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight for the first time. An entire fan base dedicated to classics like Blade and From Dusk Till Dawn must have been devastated when their favorite genre was essentially handed off to an entire generation of teenage girls who prefer tight abs and sparkling skin to sharp teeth and bloody gore.

Warm Bodies
Lovers of zombies and horror might feel the same about Warm Bodies, the zombie romcom that opened over Super Bowl weekend. The movie features a teenage zombie who falls in love with a living, breathing girl, which slowly cures him of his undead state as he begins to fall in love with her. If this sort of love story sounds like an even worse butchering of horror film than Twilight, it shouldn’t.
If your sixteen-year-old cousin wants to see Warm Bodies because she’s a self-proclaimed member of Team Edward, then she’s missing the point of the movie. Warm Bodies is a mere parody of what Twilight did to the vampire genre. The story is fun and entertaining, yes, but for those of you who love zombies, take solace in the fact that Warm Bodies isn’t taking anything away from the genre. In fact, it keeps getting better.The Walking Dead

Last year’s episode “Killer Within” was a brutal episode of the popular series The Walking Dead. Cami Hadley at http://www.cable.tv/ said it was “fueled with fear and grief” and that might be describing it lightly. The second half of season three is back and doesn’t appear to be slowing pace. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the mid-season premiere on February 10 raked in 12.3 million viewers, a record high for the show.

This all started from an already popular graphic-novel series from author Robert Kirkman. The comics are still well ahead of the show, so if you grab some of the newer volumes on Amazon, you can get ahead of the show’s story, which mirrors the comics pretty accurately.World War Z

The epic $200 million blockbuster based on Max Brooks’ apocalyptic zombie novel stars Brad Pitt and is slated to hit theaters this summer, according to Hollywood.com. This movie has just about everything — action, violence, a star-powered cast, and thousands upon thousands of zombies. Like The Walking Dead, you can read the novel if you don’t want to wait for the movie’s release.

But unlike the gritty, paced nature of the TWD, World War Z seems to be a more action-packed, in-your-face epic that doesn’t mind skimping on the story to deliver just a bit more blood and gore. And what zombie fan can’t get behind that?Day Z

Zombie-themed video games are nothing new, but the up-and-coming Day Z is giving a new twist to the survival genre that gamers have rarely seen before. Based off a fan-made mod to the game “Arma 2,” Day Z is a zombie survival game with a twist — if you die, your character is dead forever. That means any gear, food or weapons you collected die with it. On top of all that, not only does this force you to play the game carefully, but you can also be killed by other players as well. That means the intensity is teeming throughout the whole game. Trust no one, as they say.

The developers of the game hope to have the full version released this year, and you can track some of their progress on the game’s Tumblr.